The Beautiful Natalie Zea on Her TV-Watching Habits

The star of The Following and Justified and now Amazon's The Rebels loves True Detective.

Natalie Zea, who first won us over as Will Ferrell's batshit ex in The Other Guys and has gone on to become one of our favorite women in television with The Following and Justified, is pioneering the next wave of entertainment programming. She stars in the pilot The Rebels, one of the ten original pilots from Amazon whose shot at a full series is being determined by viewers. You can watch the pilot here. While awaiting her fate, Zea made the case for the show, in which she plays a former cheerleader newly anointed owner of a misfit pro-football team, and told us about her own misguided attempt at cheerleading.

ESQUIRE.COM: Your pilot is part of Amazon's experiment. It must be nerve-racking for your fate to be in the hands of the audience.

NATALIE ZEA: Yeah, but isn't that the way it should be? I won't deny that it's nerve-racking, but I think ultimately Amazon's been really smart to get in on the beginning of it. I just feel like the days of a handful of executives making the decisions for the entirety of the human public have gone on long enough.

ESQ: How does the audience know what they want?

NZ: It's just that I would push my own agenda if I were making those decisions. I would absolutely want to see—

ESQ: More Natalie?

NZ: Right. [Laughs] Well, I would want to see what I would want to see. I think if that were the case, if it were a personal agenda, we might have better-quality TV. More often than not, I think instead what happens is there's a lot of attempts at mind-reading. The fact is that viewers are fickle and it's rare that such a large group of people can be categorized in any type of way. There's enough content to go around, and if we stop focusing on numbers and start focusing on the quality of the project then I think everybody — viewers and artists alike — is going to be a lot happier.

ESQ:There is no more ER, the show everyone is tuning in to watch.

NZ: We're becoming a little smarter and our tastes are evolving and we want singular programs. I want something that is very much geared toward me. Not me and the other however many billion people on the planet.

ESQ: Do you have any of those sort of niche shows you're into?

NZ: I'm a huge Community fan.

ESQ: That seems like a show that you'd have guest-starred on.

NZ: If you have an in, let me know. I mean I'm friends with those guys, I see them at parties, they're always so lovely and so personable and sweet as can be. And my fiancé was on it a little while back so yeah, I mean look, whatever campaigning I can do.

ESQ: We'll get it going right now.

NZ: Yes, please.

ESQ: So what else do you watch?

NZ: The network stuff I watch tends to be comedy. I rarely watch any network dramas. The dramas I watch are on the cable side, but I watch the good shows — the shows that people talk about. I watch Girls and I watch Episodes and I watch Mad Men and True Detective. Don't spoil that one for me because I'm behind.

NZ: I saw the big one. I was actually in a hotel without a DVR, which is barbaric. [Laughs] It's interesting when you're watching something that intense in real time and knowing you can't go to the bathroom. You can't get up to get a glass of water. It's very in the moment, and I kind of enjoyed it. I wasn't breathing.

ESQ: Did you leave The Following for The Rebels? Your character was killed in the first episode of the new season.

NZ: With The Following I think everybody goes into it knowing your day could be up at any moment. It was about toward the end of the first season, once we realized this would be the end. I was fully prepared. I felt like it was a really great wrap-up for the character and I felt really solid about the decision. So I was preparing to take some time off and this came along rather quickly. I knew I couldn't pass it up because it fulfilled so many of my very strict criteria that I was going to try and implement for the next go-round. It just happened to fall into all of those categories, so it was crazy luck.

ESQ: What were those criteria?

NZ: I wanted to do a comedy. I wanted to be based in LA. I wanted to be — how do I put this without sounding awful? I needed for it to be a show surrounded by the character I was playing. And what is the fourth? Oh! I didn't want to be anyone's love interest.

ESQ: Interesting.

NZ: Which was tough because when I told my reps that, they were like, "That's never going to happen." And I'm like, "Well, I'll take a year off. I don't care. And when I'm desperate I'll go do something where two of those things fit." And so all four of them just fell into place as I was reading the script and I was just thinking, This is crazy. This can't be. So I said, "Yes, please. Let's go. Let's do this immediately."

ESQ: So you're just waiting to see if it's picked up?

NZ: Yeah. I've developed a really healthy detachment to these kinds of things. I've done a bunch of pilots. Coincidentally, all of them have been picked up. This would be a first if it didn't, but still when you do it long enough, there's a built-in knowledge of "the odds of this happening are slim to none."

ESQ: Between this show, which is about football, and Justified and The Following, you seem to have infiltrated the TV of men.

NZ: The boy's world?

ESQ: Yeah, which is great. We love to have you here.

NZ: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Sometimes though — I don't want to get myself in trouble, I'm so beyond grateful — it's just that, for instance, a friend of mine was shooting a scene recently, and he was shooting it with three other actresses in the scene. He was telling me this story, and he said, "At one point I realized I've never done a scene with this many women." And it made me so sad because I'm a girl's girl and I just feel as though, as lucky as I've been, I never really get to do scenes with women, and I love doing scenes with women. There is a singularity to that that you can't really get with a guy. [Laughs] So I love being in the boy's club. I'll take it and continue to do it, but I really relish getting to do scenes with other gals.

ESQ: All right, well here's hoping.

NZ: I'm going to pitch so much. If this pilot goes, we're going to find some creative ways to get some women in there.

ESQ: The cast is so out there. Michael Strahan shows up, and isn't he an executive producer?

NZ: He is, yeah, and actually he made it to set I think a couple times, so he's very hands-on.

ESQ: The charm just sort of melts off that guy.

NZ: Yeah, and the stories he tells. Talk about covering a huge demographic. There's really no sect of person that doesn't find him intoxicating.

ESQ:And then you have Billy Dee Williams in there. Having Lando as a coach.

NZ: Oh, we'll spar. Yeah, I'm sure we will.

ESQ:Are you much of an actual football fan?

NZ: I grew up in West Texas so it's sort of in me already, but that's the extent of it. I think it was the only real sport on in the house growing up, consistently. There's something about it that's very comforting to me. I know the rules because I was a cheerleader in high school and you had to, so it's the only game I can watch and actually know what's going on and be able to keep up. Everything else is just sort of background noise.

ESQ: You were a West Texas football cheerleader?

NZ: Well, for a period. I ended up hanging up my pom-poms, so to speak, after a couple of years because it just wasn't me. I was a theater geek, and I was a surly cheerleader, and that's really kind of a contradiction. I realized, you know what? This spot should go to someone who really wants to be doing this. So I opted out after a couple years, but I still did it. I still participated, so you know, I have it under my belt.

ESQ:Put it on your resume. A surly cheerleader—

NZ: I was just so angry! Well, I was such a grouchy little teenager. That kind of bled into my cheerleading career.

ESQ: Are you still doing Justified?

NZ: Well, next season is the last season. I did a teeny little scene in episode one. That was it. [Editor's note: She just shot another.]

ESQ: That's all we get from you this season?

NZ: They're wrapping up soon, so I don't know. I don't really know. I'm as curious as the audience is as to why. I find it interesting. My character was pregnant for three seasons. This baby was a very big part of the narrative, at least for Winona and Raylan, and now unceremoniously, the baby appeared and Winona is just kind of out of the picture. So I'm curious like everybody else. I'm not really sure where this is going. I'm not really sure what the intent behind it is, but I'm sure there is one given how good the show is and how meticulous they are with the narrative. So we'll all see together.

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